What about the Baby? Infancy and Parenting in the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

This article reviews the evolution of a newborn through the first year of life and the potential impacts of COVID-19 on the infant, parent, and the parent-infant relationship. Babies grow in the context of relationships, and the quality of those relationships affects the physiological and psychological organization of the baby. Precisely because each baby is a being with unique biology, temperament, and ways of experiencing, feeling, and learning, much is to be discovered and understood about them. The baby’s wordless communications require their parents to intuit, infer, hypothesize, and experiment as parents come to know the needs of their baby. As we walk alongside parents who struggle to come to know their infant – even as the infant is coming to know them – we are required to have conceptual knowledge of how a newborn becomes a fully awakened infant. Under typical conditions, the birth of a firstborn baby presents a caregiving challenge and developmental opportunity for the emerging parent. Environmental context can serve to support or interfere in the success of the adjustment. This paper will explore some theoretical underpinnings that contribute to infant and parent well-being and the possible impact of being born during the COVID-19 pandemic. Also considered will be the undue burden of families bearing the weight of economic inequities, oppression, and structurally supported racism. This article will explore the influence of parental perception, the development of attachment relationships, and how that is influenced by and influences infant communication. Finally, it will suggest ways that psychotherapists seeing individuals who are parents can hold the infant in mind as they work to understand and respond to their adult clients navigating the impacts of this pandemic.

KEYWORDS:

• Infant mental health
• COVID-19
• infant development
• parent-infant psychotherapy
• infant attachment

Acknowledgments

I am enormously grateful for the myriad of ways Deborah Weatherston has influenced my clinical thinking and writing, and for her careful review and comments on an earlier draft of this paper. This paper is adapted, with permission, from a 2019 article in the Infant Crier, a quarterly newsletter of the Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. “They” is a gender-neutral term and will be used periodically in the article.

2. Though Ainsworth and other early attachment studies focused on mothers, primarily because of the cultural context, “mothering” is non-gendered, and no inference is made that only females or the biological mother can be the primary attachment figure.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julie Ribaudo

Julie Ribaudo is a Clinical Professor of Social Work at the University of Michigan and a doctoral student at Wayne State University. An endorsed Infant Mental Health Mentor with 35 years of experience with families with infants and young children, she also provides clinical and reflective supervision to a wide range of individuals and groups across the United States. Her research is focused on the prevention of the intergenerational transmission of trauma.